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No, I’m not talking about the kid from the movie “The Goonies.” I’m talking about data-driven journalism.

This week I read “Data-Driven Journalism Trends for 2014” on Digital Amy’s blog. She gives her top 5 trends for 2014 starting with sensor data. Sensor data comes from devices that contain sensors such as a running watch or your fridge. This is an upcoming trend because we expect to see sensors in more and more products. “All these devices contain tiny bits of data that in aggregate can be quite eye opening of bigger societal patterns and trends of what is happening in the world today,” the blogger writes. Often sensor data helps third party entities or manufactures to gain information about the consumer and it’s a guess as to what sensor data will be used for in 2014.

The second trend was a growing use of d3 for mapping. Mapping data continues to be a hot topic and with Data Drive Documents (d3), this looks to continue. She uses this awesome Wired article to explain how more people, especially journalists will use d3 in the future.

Trend three is all about libraries, which we know I love. Instead of physical libraries, these are data libraries and should be helpful to all of us. There is a growing number of data libraries, although that’s not terribly surprising as collections of media are becoming more popular. It’s much the same with digital storytelling, which you can read about on my What’s Your Story blog.

Trend four looks at JavaScript, HTML5 and jQuery. Now if you haven’t worked with these three before, you are in for an interesting year in 2014. As more developers and web gurus begin to use these three in combination, interactivity and intuitively are really going to see an increase on many websites. HTML5 already fascinates me with how it encompasses and alleviates issues from previous coding languages so I can’t wait to see what these three can do together.

The last trend deals with analysis and meaning of the data, which is fantastic because sometimes it seems like journalists are a bit scared of actually explaining those statistics they included. I definitely agree with Digital Amy that we want to see the beautiful infographic or display, but we also want to know the meaning behind what you’re showing us.

That was the only reading for this week so this was a short one. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter.

This week I read two chapters from “Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Audience Information System” by Philip Napoli. His chapters were all about user engagement in today’s media environment, and the chapters can are easily summarized by this one quote, “Everyone’s in an arms race to find out more about their users” (p. 89). This quote really resonated with me because of how true it is, no matter if you’re a professional or mere media user.

For instance, when I first started using Facebook back in my undergrad days as a mere user, the most significant form of “engagement” to users around me was how many friends you had. There were those people that would friend everyone they remembered from high school — whether they actually knew them or not — just to add more “friends” to their profile. Now today, as a social media professional, I don’t get overly excited about reach, or the number of people who like my organization’s page. I’m more interested in how many of those likes actually turn in to something, mainly proof that our users are listening and communicating back to us. Engagement has really grown as a buzz word in the past years and now, as Napoli points out, “the embrace of engagement as a new metric for understanding audience behavior is widespread” (p. 91).

Media is no longer “merely the passive vehicle through which consumers are exposed to advertisements…The content of the media should itself be thought of as providing experiences for the viewer or reader” (p. 98). While most of us have this figured out, Napoli notes that it is not completely clear where the effects of engagement occur. This is why there is still a variety of definitions and explanations of engagement.

Napoli has some other great points so check out his book. I also read “Why Comments Suck (And Some Ideas on Unsucking Them” by Xark. Now technically this article was written for newspapers, but the ideas behind why comments suck rang true for me as a blogger as well. The first reason for why comments sucked was because we don’t value them.

This made me think about my engagement through comments, and the article is right: I don’t value them. Sure I’ll read comments on other blogs and such now and then, and of course read them on my own blog. But how many times do I make a comment on someone else’s work? Not often enough. One solution for this is to just make a fresh start and do better. Put value into comments is an important aspect of generating engagement.

This week’s readings were all about search engine optimization and web analytics. I really enjoyed these readings because this is a big part of what I do day-to-day at my job where I manage library websites and social media. Last semester, I did a project on drafting social media policies and a project on creating goals and a dashboard related to the library website. I’ll be sharing a few pieces of those projects in this post since it directly relates to the readings.

Reach – This is kind of an obvious one you would want to track since it concerns audience growth rate. Reach allows you to track growth over time, which is positive because you can see the highs and lows of when your audience is at its peaks during the year. For example, I work for a public library in a college town. From tracking our reach on a monthly basis, we know that we are going to have a decrease in audience growth during the summer because a good portion of the town population is gone. For this same reason, we know we will see a spike in audience growth when the school year starts up and new incoming students begin to follow the library.

Engagement – I have found that many novices to social media really pinpoint on the reach metric and how important it can be to your business, leading them to not pay as much attention to engagement. This is a BIG mistake because while reach shows you the size of your audience, engagement allows you to understand if what you’re posting is actually something your audience is interested in. Social engagement is not happening if you’re followers are silent participants.

Acquisition – With acquisition, you will want to have some sort of web analytics being reported for your website, as this allows you to see how many people you’re pushing to your website from social media. Acquisition lets you know which audience members are returning vs. new and where they came from.

Conversion – This metric allows you to connect social media date to what it’s doing for your business. This is easier to track when your business involves profits, but non-profits have been starting to use it more frequently as well.

Activity – This shows the actual impact on your business. With activity, you can track if your business is saving money by using social media.

Another article I read this week was “A Scientific Guide to Writing Great Headlines on Twitter, Facebook and Your Blog.” This article had some great ideas and actually shows you some trial-and-error moments so you can visually see what worked and didn’t work. For example, the article found that using action words (verbs instead of nouns) was helpful in Twitter posts. It also gave a list of the top 20 most retweetable words and the correct way to post pictures to Facebook.

The article also noted research related to photos, such as photos outperform other types of posts and will get higher engagement. Be careful with this idea though because it doesn’t work for everyone. For instance, at the library I work at text posts will get the highest reach and engagement, while photos and links to websites tend to fall flat.

One thing I thought these articles left out was the idea that social media continues to change. One day the types of posts your business is using might do phenomenally, while other days they may do nothing for your company. This could be because your audience changes or it is a low time in the year. However, one other explanation social media professionals should be ready for is a change to the algorithm that determines what shows up in a follower’s feed. This happens periodically with Facebook and suddenly your posts are not doing as well because less people are seeing them due to a system change. Social media professionals should be prepared for this type of problem and have ideas ready to circumvent this problem when it happens.